


Twenty aspects of Sophonisba's personal extensions to Canon

by Sophonisba



Category: Arsène Lupin - Maurice Leblanc, Mycroft Holmes Series - Quinn Fawcett, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: 20 Things, Gen, List Fic, Worldbuilding, metafictual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-02
Updated: 2011-05-02
Packaged: 2017-10-18 22:11:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/193857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sophonisba/pseuds/Sophonisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a number of stories I want to tell in this fandom, but these are inherent to nearly all of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twenty aspects of Sophonisba's personal extensions to Canon

**Author's Note:**

> These extensions are ones I have internalized after being exposed to the thoughts, speculations, and inventions of _many many people_.
> 
> I think Carole Nelson Douglas and the authors named up there in the "other fandoms" may be the most notable of my influences, but if anything in here seems to be something that someone else thought of aforetimes, I'm quite sure that they did.

  1. The friendship between Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson is the most important relationship in either of their lives.
  

  2. Holmes, despite usual emotional cluelessness, knows this perfectly well; Watson doesn't consciously realize it and would probably feel guilty if he comprehended that he prioritized matters thus, and so neither Holmes nor Mary have ever told him.
  

  3. Holmes is an aromantic asexual with Asperger syndrome (high-functioning, aka "can sham normal very well for short periods and for a given value of normal for rather longer ones") and bipolar disorder attempting to self-medicate. The bipolar disorder flattens out with age and can be partly managed with meditation when at neither extreme; conversely, keeping up an act of any sort (particuarly for longer terms) grows more stressful, and Watson's eventual removal to Queen Anne Street was occasioned as much by his understanding that 221b was getting to be too small for two people when one of them had Holmes' increased need for downtime space as for his own reasons.
  

  4. Holmes and Mary vastly approved of each other. Once Holmes got over the initial generic snit at the thought of Watson removing from their lodgings, it was obvious (at least to a mind of that calibre) that she was nearly the best person he could possibly have shared setting up a separate household with; and Mary always knew that she would be sublimated to a) patients and b) Holmes, and was proud of a husband who had taken on such noble callings (it was hardly as if she did not put her pupils' needs first or her own writing career highly). Once that was settled, they respected each other's mind and use of it.
  

  5. Under a pseudonym, Mary was a successful author of kitchen-table books and a few novels for children. After her loss, her husband completed the last of the latter and wrote its sequel from an outline she'd left (they were rather like Reeve's _Larklight_ trilogy, save that "Mary Westmoreland's" humor ran more to gentle and occasionally all-too-accurate reflections of societal foibles than Reeve's tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek).
  

  6. Initially, Watson co-wrote many of his early works with an oculist named Doyle; Holmes misunderstood the man's middle name to be part of a surname, and between Sherlockian inability to assimilate data irrelevant to fields of interest, force of personality, and widespread acquaintance, said oculist soon became generally known as Conan Doyle (which, on reflection, he preferred the sound of anyway, although Watson was one of the few friends who knew him as Doyle till the end of the chapter). As JHW and ACD collaborated so often and tended to publish a story under whichever name they thought might best sell it, it is often difficult to tell from internal evidence who wrote what: ACD wrote the giant Western flashback when they spun off "A Study in Scarlet" and certainly helped with the additional _Strand_ disguises of characters who'd appeared in the privately published _Reminiscenses_ ; Brigadier Gerard was an ACD creation, but both of them are known to have written his stories; and The White Company was a co-production, but ACD alone was responsible for its prequel Sir Nigel, the History of the Boer War, and all eight Professor Challenger stories. JHW wrote most of the stories published post-Hiatus on his own, although illness meant that ACD stepped in to finish or write from outline many of the stories in the _Case-Book_ , a few with help from Holmes. (Also, "The Final Problem" was a collaboration between ACD and Mary when JHW kept drying up after the preamble, although he did add the ending dedication; and which stories were collected in which volumes is not quite the same as in our world.)
  

  7. ACD is rather like a calmer, much more neurotypical, rather more romantic and sexual Holmes with a wider variety of interests. As such, he and Holmes tend to rub each other the wrong way despite their very real respect for each other's brains, and it's not helped by the fact that Holmes is a little jealous of ACD for being able to fit in and once wasted rather a lot of time being miserably jealous before Watson deduced the problem and pointed out that no, he was hardly going to abandon a friend for the more socially respectable model, and besides ACD doesn't need him as much; or that ACD, while acknowledging the eccentricity of genius and believing Holmes to be more brilliant than himself (to the point that now and again he has paraphrased Voltaire to his acquaintances: "If Mr Sherlock Holmes did not exist..."), privately assumes that Holmes could have helped indulging said eccentricities quite so much.
  

  8. JHW and ACD were knighted in 1893 for isolating a serum produced by organelles in the pancreas (following Holmes' notebooks, which detailed the procedure as a control amid records of attempts to synthesize it in laboratory conditions) and then using it to treat diabetes. (The lives saved by this procedure help ensure that the future of Holmes' world looks rather different from our own.) While both of them were unhesitant to give Holmes the lion's share of the credit, knighthood is not a posthumous sort of honor; and by the time Holmes returned, the serum had rather become yesterday's news. (Holmes, indeed, felt that failing to realize the immediate _and lifesaving_ applications of the preliminary isolate should disqualify one from any such honor anyway, and, indeed, that "pancrein" [as it was then known] should replace or amplify "Norbury.") 

It would have done wonders for their medical careers, but ACD's writing career was taking off and he soon chose to retire on his laurels to write full-time; JHW lost his wife between the discovery and the ceremony, and when he threw himself into his practice after a major bout of grief, between the patients who had switched practitioners in the meantime, the relative quietness of the practice Watson had bought with an eye to making time for Holmes, and the earlier counterimpetus of Col. Moriarty's vendetta, the practice proved so scant that he went on to throw himself into charity work of various sorts -- which naturally precluded opportunities to trade financially on his name.

  

  9. Watson is cheerfully bisexual and naturally monogamous (although that can and has extended to stable threesomes); insomuch as he has a type, it's smart, shorter than he is, and blond, with nice hands. 

During his first few months of rooming with Holmes, he felt some tentative so-not-my-type proximity-based attraction that soon enough resolved into friendship (far sooner than his equivalent UST with Mrs Hudson, for example), although he would now and then regretfully note that it was too bad such elegant hands were half-wasted on someone who put them to no more sensual use than playing the violin.

Watson told Mary about his past liaisons, of course. She didn't particularly mind (the fact that for all his blithe sensuality, she was the first woman he'd actually been in love with may have had something to do with that).

He kept up his membership in a particular club catering to gentlemen of a certain persuasion after his marriage in order to keep in touch with some of his friends, politely declining any offers of physical intimacy with an 'I'm afraid I'm spoken for.' On a few occasions, indeed, Mary called at the club to let him know that a patient needed him; twice some of the club's cross-dressing members and guests mistook her for one of themselves and swept her up for a consultation on beautifying methods. On one such occasion, Holmes, having been disguised as one of the club's waiters on the trail of a case, was seized by inspiration, broke cover, and attempted to collect Watson for a quick chase; there was something of an awkward confrontation which Holmes cut short by beginning "My dear Watson, you know me to be erratic in my habits," passing through many and various other failings as a coinhabitant, and finishing "I am not, however, unobservant", before sweeping off -- followed, after a moment, by both Watsons, to general applause and approbation.
  

  10. The paragraph about 'my wife had gone to her mother's' near the beginning of "The Five Orange Pips" was the idea for a beginning of a story that JHW had absentmindedly jotted down in the margin of the manuscript copy that accidentally got sent to the _Strand_ : it was inserted by a bemused copy-editor into the story proper. (JHW was annoyed. ACD was amused. Mary nearly died laughing and promptly began teasing her husband about this mythical first wife, keeping it up as an ever-more-elaborate joke that, in its final form, established the lady's mother as the Ranee of Magadha.) 

Other such editorial emendations were 'baritsu' for 'jhujutsu' in "The Empty House" (although that may have been due to the hired typist, and in either case the responsible party was probably thinking of 'bartitsu') and 'Chaldean' for 'Tartessean' in "The Devil's Foot" (which Holmes got very annoyed indeed about, possibly because Chaldean ancestry was a particular academic's crackpot theory); _Beeton's Christmas Annual_ 's sacrifice of the final '-er' in 'his wrists are fairer' to the requirements of typesetting (copied in all later reprints of STUD, though not the _Reminiscenses_ ) seems mild and innocuous by comparison.

  

  11. At least one of Watson's near ancestors is Marathi. John H. Watson (the H. after his father) can pass for fully European, and has been doing so, to his self-disgust. His brother can't. 

He told Mary, of course. He hasn't told many of his partners before or since (except those who already knew).

Holmes, naturally, noticed the gist of it within five minutes of meeting him, although it took rather longer to deduce 'Mahratta' rather than Hindi or Tamil or what-have-you, and couldn't be bothered to mention it until they had a case when it would be very useful for somebody to disguise themselves as a Maratha cavalryman (at least, of the many disguises that would be highly useful in the circumstances, it was the only one Holmes thought Watson at all likely to pull off).

  

  12. Holmes' deduction that Colonel Sebastian Moran had shot Adair in order to cover up some postualted cheating at cards, while only stretching Occam's razor slightly, was sadly incorrect. Moran had been in the habit of playing cards with two men who counted them as naturally as they breathed; one of them had worked out the change in odds for nearly every possible hand in the most common card games once when he got bored, and required Moran to memorize said odds to improve the association's cash flow and otherwise launder at least some of his own money -- he doesn't NEED to cheat at cards. 

Moran shot Ronald Adair just to watch him die.

  

  13. SCAN was neither the first nor the last time Holmes encountered Irene Adler, who performed under the title of 'La Carina' (although Holmes, naturally, filed her under A in the scrapbook). Indeed, the two of them collaborated when the woman and Godfrey Norton inflitrated Moriarty's organization, inserting themselves deeply enough that they were the ones entrusted to lure Dr Watson into a trap whence he would only be released should Sherlock Holmes fail to survive Professor Moriarty: otherwise, the Professor had instructed them to send Dr Watson back 'in snuffboxes.' Irene, having prudently poured glue into the workings of Col. Moran's air-gun and replaced his rifle bullets with duds, merely decoyed Watson away before hurrying to rejoin her husband, who was attempting to find higher ground than Moran; the land around the Reichenbachfall is rough enough that Moran didn't reach his position in time to affect matters, Norton didn't reach his in time to prevent Moran from attempting anything, and while the Nortons (with the eventual high ground, and rather more bullets than the few spares Moran proved to have on him) despite not being able to see anything lower down on that side, and only knowing that Watson hadn't slipped or anything by hearing his calls, would have been able to try to drive Moran back from the edge had he attempted Watson's life, all three of them were more or less trapped up there until evening and wound up shooting at each other in the twilight, the sound of their shots mostly drowned by the roar of the falls. (Fortunately for them, Moran didn't know who was interfering with his little experiment to verify the continuing presence of gravity.) 

As a matter of fact, the most notorious of their earlier encounters would probably be the time that the woman, doing a fellow expatriate a favor, disguised herself as a much older woman in order to retrieve poor Lucy Ferrier's wedding-ring. (Irene assumed Holmes had realized that it had been her, if not at once, within a few days; Holmes saw no reason to disabuse her.) Hope had the ring she'd returned to him on his person when he died; Watson arranged for it to be switched with the real article and for the latter to be buried with him.

  

  14. The false wedding-ring from the Lauriston Gardens case, after that second substitution, was thrown into the back of Holmes' desk's drawers and remained there, save for one or two other similar deceptions, until Watson's engagement, at which point Holmes handed it over to him. Watson protested, but Holmes pointed out that it had been bought as a decoy, used for that purpose, and not been needed for as much for a long time; that, having fulfilled the function paid for, it might as well resume the purpose it was made for; and what the deuce did Watson imagine Holmes should want with a wedding-ring?
  

  15. The woman, despite her name of adventuress and occasional willingness to use her acting skills for less-than-legal purposes, is hardly a thief and, save for her infiltration of the organization, not a confidence artist for mere money; for an opponent of that nature, one must rather look to Aline Victoire, daughter and successor of the legendary thief 'Mister Christopher,' who even outwitted Holmes once and managed to continually escape arrest until she went into semi-retirement to set up house with her old friend Henriette Pascal and help raise (and train) the latter's son Raoul. 

(Said son spent a fair amount of time embellishing and outright lying about his own encounters with Holmes to his not-so-good friend Leblanc, until the regrettable affair of the Hollow Needle, which upset him too much for dishonesty). Holmes was very nearly as upset at and guilty about the conclusion of that case; Mlle St. Clair gallantly threw herself in the path of a wooden bullet at just the angle necessary for it to deal her solar plexus a lethal blow.

  

  16. The most winning woman Sherlock Holmes had ever known was the lady of the manor in a small English village, having married the head of a family of country squires: she performed her social duties to perfection, charmed the whole county, was a pillar of the local church's circles, always said the right thing to the right person at the right time, and bore up under the sad loss of Holmes' two youngest siblings with watery-eyed saintly fortitude. Young Sherlock was, naturally, the first to notice and almost immediately announce that she was poisoning a third child, not satisfied with two sets of death-compensation, and was initially met with near-universal patronizing dismissal and then outraged disbelief.
  

  17. Patterson was a false name used in "The Final Problem" to try to keep the man in question shielded from the vengeful whispering campaign of Col. Moriarty, especially as his customary excellent police-work had already brought him to certain unwanted attention. He had gone largely unnoticed by the colonel so far because enough policemen had been involved in the actual arrest of the organization and lawful search and seizure of their effects that prosecuting counsel had called them by ones and twos to give evidence about the various undeniable proofs they had found, seeing no reason to waste a jury's time with externalities; indeed, there had been enough from that first haul -- and from information received from certain Government personnel that had found themselves looking into and passing on this or that as a result of words to the wise from the General Clerk -- for the Metropolitan Police and those other bodies of police whose territory the organization encompassed to make a second round of arrests before the day was out, netting nearly all of the organization still in Britain and most of it in the Channel Islands, France, and the Low Countries, and in passing using so many people that neither indignant friends-or-relations of the accused or any possible remnants of the organization (at sea, or in Ireland, or otherwise abroad) could have had enough resources to take revenge on all of them. 

Mary chose 'Patterson' partly because it sounded a little like the man's actual surname, and partly because it was very nearly the Christian name of one of the other witnesses, a clerk and agent of the coordinator of British intelligence (who presumably could take care of himself, and in any case did not have a household to worry about).

  

  18. Holmes' brother Mycroft is a high-functioning genius with Kannerian autism; his value to Government became so apparent early on (partly due to the efforts of the successor to the head of one of the intelligence services, who recommended and made excuses for his "discovery" without stressing or provably concealing their familial ties) that Government agreed to an elaborate shell game. While making himself a central clearinghouse of Intelligence data in the same way that Mycroft Holmes absorbs and retains both it and all the rest of the paperwork of Whitehall (which was just good sense, and something he'd have done anyway), aided by a physical resemblance that he did his best to emphasize, the aforementioned new head took up residence almost next to M. Holmes, matched or parallelled his schedule rather more flamboyantly, and made himself known to the various Ministries, all under the name of 'Mycroft Holmes.' Often enough the ersatz-Mycroft would act as a mouthpiece for the original, and many civil servants (as well as most of the politicians they might be imagined to serve) did not even realize there were two of them; a misapprehension ersatz-Mycroft did his best to perpetuate, complaining about his 'younger brother' in precisely the appropriate familial world-weary tone after Sherlock Holmes became well-known, employing a body double to perpetuate the flamboyant punctility whenever fieldwork necessitated, and ensuring that his closest professional associates (including said double) either believed him to be the only Mycroft Holmes or, like Dr Watson, would always refer to him even in their own private diaries as such, at least for the duration of the masquerade. After all, the British Empire could with difficulty replace even a coordinator of intelligence services; it could not replace a Mentat. 

The masquerade itself held for longer than one might have believed possible, although Sherlock Holmes thought it was all rather silly, and the directors of the Diogenes Club of course knew perfectly well that they had two members called Mycroft Holmes, one of whom was on their Board; but they would not have become Boardmembers had they found such personal data of any interest to them.

  

  19. The Diogenes Club, as well as the Strangers' Room for conversing with others and the Quiet Rooms where all noise is prohibited, has several rooms set aside for those who cannot help making noises (whether because of physical tics, stertorous respiration, or the inability to read something quietly); in them, as in the Quiet Rooms, making any recognition of one's fellow-members is absolutely prohibited. 

In fact, the Diogenes was one of the first gentlemen's clubs to admit minorities and the first to accept female members: the Board of Directors ruled that if you were paying enough attention to a due observer of the club's rules to be outraged by his or her presence, you clearly were far too nosy for the Diogenes. Comparatively few of those thus eligible particularly wanted to pay the club's high fees to be ignored within when they could be ignored far more cheaply elsewhere, but for those who did, the Diogenes Club was as much a haven from the press of society as it was to their male Caucasian brethren.

Perhaps due to this early plasticity, it is one of the few traditional clubs still active in the twenty-first century, although by that point the Inescapable Noise rooms are fitted with white-noise generators, both they and the Quiet Rooms have plugs and Ethernet ports set into the floor near every chair, the building has added an athletic club annexe where the rules against interaction are slightly relaxed and a few padded rooms where members can indulge themselves in fits of rage or fits of fits before letting themselves back out, the staff have a valet phone-answering service the way staff elsewhere might offer valet parking (and mobiles are otherwise strictly prohibited, even the rooms being fitted so as to block their signal, as they were fitted to block radio waves before that), and a certain firm recently earned a rich fee for figuring out how to set up the rooms for wireless while still blocking mobile phones and other radio waves.

  

  20. The cottage in Sussex is in both Holmes and Watson's names. Holmes did it without bothering to ask Watson's permission, as well as deliberately choosing one large enough for the expectation that Watson and his new family would holiday there whenever they liked, and the hope that someday Watson would retire there and once more share a home, this time in rooms large enough for two or three people (and a live-in servant upstairs, if necessary) to rattle around without having to interact save when the mood was upon them.
  



  
(20a. In the end, he did.)

**Author's Note:**

> Two of these don't quite (or at least only partially) hold true for "Sherlock Ambroteros"; I suppose that's what one risks when writing a fusion as well as a crossover.


End file.
